Jan 25, 2017

Wine 2.0 Stable Released, Install It In Ubuntu Or Linux Mint

After more than a year of development, Wine 2.0 has been released with over 6600 changes, which include support for Microsoft Office 2013, GStreamer 1.0 support, various Direct3D 10 and 11 improvements and more.

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) allows running Microsoft Windows application on Unix-like operating systems. It is written primarily using reverse engineering, to avoid copyright issues.

Wine 2.0 release highlights:

support for Microsoft Office 2013;

more Direct3D 10 and 11 were implemented, including several shader model 4 and 5 shader instructions, sRGB read/write support and more (but Direct 3D 11 is still not fully supported);

If you don't want Wine 2.0 to overwrite your current Wine installation, install the "wine-devel" package instead of "winehq-devel". You'll then have to run it manually because there won't be any /usr/bin/wine and so on (it's installed in /opt/wine-devel/ and its executables in /opt/wine-devel/bin/). Using the "winehq-devel package, Wine will work just like the Ubuntu repository Wine builds.

The PPA also provides Wine Staging builds, which offer some extra features. We covered Wine Staging a while back, so check it out HERE.